In April last year, I attended an evening event entitled “Everything’s Better in the North” where we endured a series of presentations by residents of Sheffield telling other residents of Sheffield about how good Sheffield is. All good people, and if you were one of those presenters (and you know who you are) please do not be offended. But I don’t need to spend two hours of my life being told that everything is going to be alright when it’s abundantly clear that it’s not.

I grew up here. Not in Sheffield itself, but in this area, and I have been coming into the city regularly for my whole life. I didn’t move to live here until 2003 but I have spent almost all of my adult life living and working in the Sheffield city region.

The speaker from Sheffield City Council did the usual thing of claiming Sheffield is well placed, amongst other things, by being next door to the Peak District, and I grew up believing that the Peak District was a special place, but I was wrong.

The Peak District is an artificially-maintained, ruined landscape. Before the Middle Ages, the whole area was forest. In fact, pretty much all of Britain was forest until it was cleared for the purposes of farming, burning, or to build ships for war and colonisation. That might seem like a long time ago but in geological terms, a few hundred years is not even the blink of an eye. In ecological terms, however, it is plenty of time to fuck up our environment.

I, too, love living in Sheffield, but where I fall out of line with many of the people who are active in the creative, business and marketing sectors is that I do not subscribe to what I would characterise as an destructively uncritical positivity-cult.

Somehow, it has become understood that to be critical is to be negative, and anything other than unfettered enthusiasm is disloyal to our home city. But someone needs to talk about the uncomfortable truths and, in the absence of any other willing soul, that someone is me.

These days, Sheffield is a shit-hole. It’s sacrilege to say so, I know, and it’s getting worse. Not all of it, of course, and there is plenty to be proud of, but also there is plenty here that we should objecting to, rather than celebrating.

Our roads are in the worst state of repair as at any point in my lifetime, homelessness is now as commonplace in Sheffield as it used to be as a cliché in London, public services are being eroded at the same time as banks and corporations are making record profits, wages are falling and employment opportunities are reducing. Publicly owned land is being sold off to corporations, and town planning control has been eviscerated to the point where we are witnessing the most poorly planned and brutal urban redevelopment since the 1960s.

Interesting times, and unless we do something about it, there is worse to come.

But now the Conservative government has offered the carrot of funding for The Great Exhibition of the North. The stick, of course, is not critcising the most corrupt and incompetent government in British history.

Having watched the promotional video, representing Sheffield’s bid and featuring University of Sheffield’s Professor Vanessa Toulmin, Chair of Museums Sheffield, Kim Streets and director of Sheffield Theatres Daniel Evans, I understand their dilemma and I sympathise. Although that is no compensation for their vacuous complicity.

Kim Streets enthuses about the “great spaces” available for the exhibition whilst standing in the Millennium Gallery, but fails to mention how many staff have been laid off by Museums Sheffield in the past few years due to austerity-led funding cuts, or the shortened opening hours of these great spaces. Professor Vanessa even has the disingenuous hubris to use the term “Northern Powerhouse”, having fully absorbed and regurgitated the Tory propaganda. She’s a highly-qualified academic and social historian and should know better.

Arts and cultural activities are, mostly, the indulgences of the middle classes, and a large proportion of the population (the same people who regularly receive nothing from arts and cultural funding) will receive nothing of value from money spent on exhibitions, craft classes, seminars and walking tours.

The disenfranchised of Sheffield and “The North” will not be re-enfranchised by the enthusiasms of academics, administrators and curators. Nor will they benefit from the fees paid to accountants, solicitors and technicians, employed to enable such a celebration.

Maybe some of that money could be used to repair the roads in “The North”, or maybe the PFI corporations charged with the task are restoring them back to their pre-tarmac days by uncovering all the cobbles and setts of yesteryear.

A61, the main southbound A road in Sheffield.Gleedless Road. Last week, I saw a toddler fall in this pothole, it is so deep.

The problem I see with this kind of festival (and I have worked on, and been to, many of them) is that it will be primarily comprised of activities of consumption and distraction, created by middle-class people, for middle-class people and selected & funded by middle-class people. Artisan bread and carbon-neutral circuses.

But we could say no.

Conditions here in “The North” are now worse than at any other point in my lifetime and pretending that everything is going to be alright is a deluded fantasy. Rather than singing “God save the Queen”, we should be singing “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”.

That might seem angry but this is what I grew up on:

For many years, a regular sight in Sheffield city centre was a man carrying a banner, claiming “The End Is Nigh”. He always seemed a little out of place, wielding his melodramatic warning amid the thronging shoppers of Fargate.

But just the other day, walking along The Moor, Pinstone Street and Fargate was like one of the continuous follow-shots from Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men” (2007), the streets lined with religious zealots, worn-out beggars and passive-aggressive chuggers, every one of them hussling for money and salvation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men

The end was nigh, after all, although I didn’t know how nigh, and now I do know, the end is even nigher.

I never expected to be the angriest voice in the village during my own middle ages. But where is the protest? I was a young adult at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s but I do not see any of the anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian rebelliousness in young people today, just when we need it most. They seem to be too busy watching “Game of Thrones”, or playing Minecraft, or else whacked on energy drinks, too distracted to recognise what a sterile, debt-ridden dystopia they are growing up in.

There’s plenty of money about. Not in Sheffield, of course, but ask Google, ask Apple, ask Barclays or maybe even ask the Bank of England who conjured £375 billion of funny money in 2009 to support a group of businesses, supposedly too big to fail, whose operational practices are indistinguishable from organised crime.

“Every day, we’re busy helping our millions of customers get to where they want to go in life. Lloyds TSB, for the journey.” Yeah, the journey to the local Job Centre Plus. God bless their crooked hearts.

We now live in a world of post-factual journalism, post-responsibility politics and post-competence institutions.

And this brings me back to the Great Exhibition of the North. The very name betrays a divisive cynicism only conceivable within the distorted mind of a Westminster-based “special adviser” to the most corrupt and destructive government in British history.

I genuinely apologise to anyone in Sheffield that I might have offended by suggesting that their endeavors are futile but, if it’s any consolation, I include my own. Especially in the creative & arts sectors, we have lied to ourselves for years that everything will be alright, and if we do this project or that job, or another exhibition for nothing or very little, it will lead to some sort of deferred future “success”.

But it didn’t, and there is no precedent to think it ever will.

The promised funding is nothing more than a bribe to keep “The North” quiet and those people who have contributed to the application should be ashamed of their complicity in such shallow and cynical manipulation.

But an exhibition celebrating all the good things about “Not London” will seem pretty sick when your water has been poisoned and your house condemned due to earthquake-induced subsidence.

If Sheffield wins the bid, I’m sure The Great Exhibition of the North will be about much more than stainless steel, Park Hill and Henderson’s Relish (like most exhibitions in Sheffield are), but I hope the people involved will look beyond the end of their own suburban gardens and consider how to include those in our city and region that are unrepresented by middle-class professionals: those without homes, those without status and those without disposable income.

I used to think that technology would set us free. But it didn’t. It simply served to enslave us to a treadmill of empty promises and planned obsolescence.

I used to think that if I worked hard, then I would be rewarded in proportion to that effort. But I was not. I worked harder and harder, and each time being offered less.

I used to think that art would save the world, but it hasn’t done so far and I’ve made a lot of art.

That’s why I took up gardening.

Have you noticed that they are no birds? Not literally zero, but when I was growing up, our suburban gardens were alive with sparrows, robins, blackbrids, great tits, blue tits, bullfinches, chaffinches and crows. But no more. When was the last time you saw a wild chaffinch? The only birds I see regularly in Heeley, Sheffield are magpies, and in the city centre; pigeons and occasionally starlings. And what do magpies, starlings and pigeons have in common?

They are all scavengers. They can live on human waste.

And why are there no birds? Because there are no insects. And why are there no insects? Because we humans have made our environment so sterile, so hostile to living things that not even common houseflies can survive.

And they live on shit.

Only a few weeks ago, I was at an outdoor festival in rural farmland, just outside Sheffield. I watched people spraying themselves with insect repellent. I didn’t bother, no need. There weren’t any any insects to repel.

I learned about the inter-dependency of species at junior school, before I was eleven. My parents took me to the Centre for Alternative Energy in Machynlleth, Wales when I was a pre-teen and I grew up under the misapprehension that everyone new about global warming and peak-oil (although I don’t remember that term from the 1970s), and I am ashamed to say that I just always thought that “we” would take care of it because “we” already knew about climate change, approaching resource scarcity and potential ecosystem collapse.http://www.cat.org.uk/index.html

I was wrong, and now we are witnessing the greatest die-off of species since the dinosaurs looked up and said “What was that loud bang?”.

And it’s my fault as much as anyone else’s.

My parents still live nearby, in a dormitory village where I grew up, mostly populated by middle-class control-freaks. My mother told me about the recent chafer beetle saga scandalising their neighbours and how many of them have had their lawns pumped full of insecticide to combat the creeping terror that anything less than the green, green grass of home should exist outside their picture-windows. https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=487

Sure enough, chafer beetles are a bit of a pest if you desire a perfectly manicured lawn, but they used to feed the swifts that nested in the eaves of my parents’ bungalow. But no longer.
A reported 80% die-off of bees is what either a professional ecologist or even a junior school student might characterise as A VERY BAD THING.

I’m sorry to confuse you with technical terms but this shit just got real.

Build it and they will come, so they say. Well, that is a paraphrase from the film “Field of Dreams” (1989 Philip Alden Robinson) in which a farm owner razes his crops to build a baseball diamond. Unfortunately, aspirational optimism, unlimited urban development and competitive sport are yet to save our ecosystem from its imminent collapse.

But I’m sure your get the point. Sure, build it and they will come, just make sure you build the right thing.

And here is the hope. Two years ago, we dug up our own lawn and planted vegetables. We didn’t have much of an agenda except a policy of growing food with no chemical fertilisers and no pesticides. That same year, we had wolf spiders mating in the insect garden I built, and bees in the neighbour’s tree.

I haven’t done a survey, but this year we have at least five different species of spider, four species of bee, along with weevils, mites, ants, butterflies and moths that were not present only two years ago. And that is in a cultivated garden.

Build it and they will come. And sure enough they did. All we had to do was not kill every living thing that moves on the earth.

And this is where I get to the point. I have volunteered to be the lead in a rooftop garden project at DINA Venue in Sheffield city centre. The idea is not my own, but I have put myself forward to be the hands and feet to make it happen.http://dinavenue.com/

DINA is the old Cutler pub & Stardust bar on Cambridge Street (behind John Lewis). Friends of mine, Deborah and Malcolm, have negotiated use of the building on an indefinite basis until it is demolished, as part of the much-delayed retail redevelopment of Sheffield city centre. They (with the help of many volunteers) have reclaimed the building from the squatted squalor it was left in and made it into a usable venue again. On the second floor, there is a large, flat roof. It’s a sterile space, but is sheltered on all sides and has abundant light and pitched roofs on three sides for rain collection.

The garden might be a one-year project or it might go on for several years. Whatever the timescale, we will be building an insect-friendly, zero-pesticide rooftop garden to foster wildlife and grow vegetables and flowers, and when it ends, the plants and resources will either be moved to a new location, or distributed to other gardens.

And this is where you come in. We have no money, and because there is no practical access for the general public, we are not likely to be eligible for any funding. So we need to beg, steal or borrow, well, everything. We need planters, water butts, garden tools, compost, seeds and soil to turn this nadir into a zenith.

Please get in touch if you have anything to contribute, no matter how modest. We will be gathering equipment and resources from now on, with a view to starting planting in February next year and a full growing season spring to autumn 2017. I’m a novice gardener and only in year two of my experience, but I’m taking advice from landscape professionals and experienced gardeners, and I am the go-to grunt on the job.

We hope that this project (and there are no doubt others) will be an awareness-raising focus for bio-diversity, sustainability and food quality, and will make a tangible contribution to fostering inner-city wildlife.

There are those who believe in the “magic bullet” of some unspecified innovation that will happen at some unspecified point in the future that will solve all our problems. It hasn’t happened so far and there is no precedent to believe that it ever will. Innovation has brought us glyphosate, GMOs and factory farming. And now we have tasteless food, infertile crops and the decimation of our ecosystem.

I used to think that all the answers were in the future, but now I realise that they were already in the past.

Advanced technologies, ideological politics, complex financial instruments and even participatory art have, so far, proved worthless in avoiding our imminent demise, so let’s go old-school. We already have all the technologies and techniques needed to establish and maintain a sustainable environment that can feed and shelter everything and everyone. We just need to stop destroying and start rebuilding.

Build it and they will come. But make sure what you build is not a Primark the size of a castle, or a 20-storey ghetto for Chinese students, or a car park over a casino.

I have received two emails from you recently and I am disappointed by both of them. Please don’t take this too personally because I still hope that I can have faith in you as my MP (Sheffield Heeley), although I am appalled by what is happening more broadly in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).

In the first email dated 3rd July 2016 (attached below), about your statement of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as leader, you say:

“we must have a leadership election, under the quickest possible timescale from which everyone must unite and abide by its result.”

We already did that.

Actually, you did but I didn’t. Because, despite being an associate member at the time, I was purged. I joined as a full member after Corbyn was elected leader (without my help), and I genuinely thought that it was the beginning of a return to proper democratic socialism. However, it seems that democracy and socialism are abundant in the membership but in short supply in the PLP.

I understand that there might be a concern that recently-joined members are joining to influence the result but without holding true to the values of the Labour Party. But charging newly-joined members an extra £25 is grotesquely cynical. I wonder how they are going to purge me this time. Maybe when this letter is published online, that will do the trick.

I know that us “Corbynistas” are often painted by the media as personality-cultists, but I had never even heard of Jeremy Corbyn until he was nominated in the leadership election, and the reason I supported him is that I discovered that there are still MPs in the Labour Party that embody the values that I have.

I was present on 31st March 2016 at the evening meeting where you and John Healey MP (Wentworth & Dearne) spoke at the Harland Café in Sheffield and I was appalled by how Healey finished his speech by imploring us “make sure you vote for us in 2020”. I’m afraid 2020 is going to be too late. MPs like him represent the permanent political class that could not care less if they achieve anything or not, whether or not they are being an effective opposition, as long as they keep their jobs. Even if he does not get re-elected, £74,962 per year (plus expenses) for the next four years is not too shabby when some of the people sleeping rough in Sheffield (or Wentworth and the Dearne) will not survive that long.

I have lived most of my life in this area, but have never seen such levels of homelessness and begging. Vulnerable and disenfrachised people need help now, not in 2020 or 2025, or whenever the Labour Party can manage to get elected again. In the meantime, the London-centric political games within the PLP achieve nothing for these people.

The Labour Party, in coalition with other left-leaning parties, should be pushing for a General Election now.

Your second email (attached below) of 14th July 2016 concerned the Chilcot Report.
I am concerned by the use of the phrase “learn lessons”. We heard that phrase used about the un-prosecuted paedophiles protected by Margaret Thatcher and other government ministers and civil servants. We also heard that phrase being used to excuse MPs for their extravagant expenses claims, rather than prosecuting them for fraud.

Sure, we need to learn lessons, but we have already had every opportunity to learn the lesson about getting involved in interventional foreign wars already. It’s almost as if John Pilger had never spoken about it, or Tony Benn, or Robin Cook, or Jeremy Corbyn.

When are these lessons going to be learned?

I hope your use of that phrase is not a veiled reference to you not supporting any motion in Parliament to condemn and possibly prosecute Tony Blair for his complicity with the United States in their pursuit of war for profit in Iraq. MPs and PMs have an exceptional responsibility due to the influence they exert over the citizens of their own country, as well as a million un-named men, women and children in Iraq, or the desperate refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea to escape US & UK-sponsored anarchy and war in Libya and Syria.

I do not advocate punitive measures for the sake of it, but Blair should be prosecuted, both as punishment and deterrent, for his callous disregard of the consequences of his actions, especially in the light of a protest of millions, and ignoring the now-vindicated counsel within his own party.

British politics is a circus of corruption, greed and incompetence, but these days there seems to be no responsibility taken by those who destroy lives and livelihoods.

I was delighted when you were elected MP for Sheffield Heeley, and that you seemed to support Jeremy Corbyn and traditional left-wring values, and hope you will continue to do so.

We face imminent, catastrophic and existential threats; climate change, the destruction of our ecosystem, unregulated property & financial speculation, and the proliferation of war. We currently have a government whose actions are actively contributing to all of them. The only hope we have is a coalition of the Left, but that requires solidarity within parties and unity between the parties, against the Conservatives. Whilst the PLP is squabbling amongst themselves, the Tories are stealing public property, turning our schools into profit centres for corporations and sending our fellow citizens to kill or be killed in foreign lands.

We can’t wait until 2020, we can’t wait another minute.

Richard Bolam
Sheffield Heeley CLP – Member L1428585

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Email from Louise Haigh – louise@louisehaigh.org.uk – 3/7/16
Dear Richard,
I’m writing obviously in response to the events of the last 10 days. As I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve received many hundreds of emails about the current issues in the Labour Party on all sides of the debate, all of which i have taken time to consider very carefully. Over the last week I have resisted all media calls to comment on the deepening crisis; I have always refused to provide a running commentary on internal Labour matters as I believe our grievances should be discussed privately. I appreciate, however, that everyone is very anxious about the current state of affairs and keen to know my thoughts so I want to be completely honest with you about where I think we are now.

Last Friday at our monthly CLP we had a discussion around the EU referendum campaign and the impending motion of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. Here, in our bit of Sheffield, local members ran a fantastic campaign on Europe but sadly the result was very disappointing. Nationally, I do not believe that Jeremy and his team were particularly committed to the campaign and on some occasions they actively obstructed it but I do not believe we can lay the blame for the vote with Jeremy. My experience in that campaign was of many people in areas such as Arbourthorne, Gleadless Valley and Jordanthorpe who felt alienated and disenfranchised from the political establishment and who voted to Leave. No one person could have turned the tide on that wave of resentment that has been growing in these communities, like so many similar communities around the country, over the last 15-plus years. However, I did make clear at that meeting that I had concerns around the competency of the current leadership and Jeremy’s wider team.
I strongly believe that the motion of no confidence was brought forward at the wrong time – when the country had just taken a huge and potentially catastrophic decision, when the Tories were in meltdown and when we had a very serious job to do as an opposition. However, over the weekend and on Monday the sacking and resignations of so many of the frontbench team left the situation untenable. Consequently, on Tuesday when I was asked ‘do you have confidence in the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn?’ I couldn’t honestly say that I did, as I could not see any way that this situation could continue.
This was an incredibly difficult decision as I have been totally supportive of Jeremy since his election, I voted with him against the Welfare Bill, I oppose the renewal of Trident and I know we need an end to austerity. I have served, and continue to serve, on his front bench and I have only ever been positive in the media and in public about him. Any concerns I’ve had have always been raised privately. Yet now I really believe that we cannot continue as we are. We are currently not able to fulfil the very basic, day-to-day operation as the Official Opposition in Parliament, which now more than ever is vital as we enter Brexit negotiations.
This has been an incredibly hard two weeks. I am so sorry that it has come to this. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the country faces its biggest challenge since World War Two. It is now our duty, first and foremost, to hold the Leave campaign to account and to offer a new radicalism to the British people. And I do not think we are currently capable of that. I completely respect the mandate Jeremy has from the membership, but in order to lead Labour in Westminster he has to have a parliamentary mandate too.
I think it’s right that colleagues currently in the Shadow Cabinet have called for a period of calm so that everyone can take a breath and look at where we are. If there is any way to find a solution, to bring unity and to get on with opposing the government, I will support that. If that doesn’t happen, then we must have a leadership election, under the quickest possible timescale from which everyone must unite and abide by its result.
I just want to reiterate how difficult and unpleasant this has all been. I take absolutely no joy in any of it; I feel desperately sorry that we have all let down those who supported Jeremy, but I am afraid we are now at an impasse and, with a General Election potentially looming, I believe we cannot continue as we currently are.
As ever, please do email or call if you want to raise any further thoughts or suggestions with me.
All the best,
Louise
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Email from Louise Haigh – louise@louisehaigh.org.uk – 14/7/16
Dear Richard —
Last week the Chilcot Report revealed the scale of the catastrophic mistake which was the Iraq War. For the families of service personnel killed and those injured and for millions of Iraqis the consequences of that war are something they will live with for the rest of their lives.
As a member of our local Party I wanted to write to you following the debate on the report which has just taken place in the House of Commons. For many of us the Iraq War was a bitter moment, one that defined our politics and one that needed answers. Today, in the House of Commons, was a moment for truth.
I was fifteen when we shamefully went to war in Iraq but I remember very clearly the powerlessness I and millions felt as the Prime Minister chose war in the teeth of fierce domestic and international opposition. Some thirteen years later, Chilcot has been very clear that the US were desperate to force regime change and that the UK Government promised in a private memo to follow them “whatever”.
The failure to properly challenge intelligence which was described as “flawed”, the failure to adequately scruitinise the case for war, the failure of the top intelligence committee to even entertain the idea Iraq didn’t have WMD, the failiure to exhaust all diplomatic avenues and the failiure in post-war planning stemmed from that determination to go to war.
Millions who marched in the build-up to war, and our very own Robin Cook who made an historic speech, saw then what we know now. A passage from the speech given by Robin Cook on the 18th March 2003 was telling: “What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.”
What is vital now though is that we learn lessons that are still relevant from this conflict.
That military timetables should not consume the diplomatic avenue, the Cabinet should be properly consulted and the way in which facts and knowledge on the one hand and opinion, judgement and belief on the other are presented should never be allowed to become blurred as the case for war is made.
Above all else what this Inquiry has confirmed is that those voices not backed by the powerful or vested interests have once again been vindicated. While government was taking us to war on “flawed intelligence and assessment” which was not properly challenged, while the media were not adequately scrutinising the case and indeed demonised those who argued against war, millions of people were saying that this was wrong. History has proven that they were right. That is the vital lesson of Chilcot and let’s never forget it.
Yours ever,
Louise

It seems I am not as much of a tinfoil-hat-wearing space-cadet as you might think. I genuinely did not think the UK would vote to leave the EU. I thought it was all just a waste-of-time sop from the Conservatives, pretending to give a tiny fuck about what British people want.
What’s more, although I was expecting another financial crash, I didn’t think #Brexit was going to cause Sterling to shit a kidney. Also, I didn’t expect a spike in race-hate crime, or the cynically opportunist Labour leadership attempted coup.

But what I have been whinging on about for years is the bias in the mainstream media (so beloved of us lizard-spotters), the promotion of anti-immigration propaganda and the demonisation of Muslims.

Here is a three-part tweet from Channel 4 News’ Krishnan Guru-Murthy on July 1st, expressing his disdain for people wearing safety pins as a sign of solidarity with immigrants in the UK:

Re pin wearing : 1. Most people are not violent, abusive racists so u don’t need to tell me you are normal – I assume that already

A bit late for the disingenuous turd to be saying that now after he, along with Cathy Newman, Jon Snow and the rest of the Channel 4 News presentation and editorial team have been happy to spread daily propaganda about immigration, Syrian “migrants” and radicalised Muslims for years.

But it’s not just Channel 4 News, these days BBC News is nothing more than a wing of the Conservative Party press office and both channels have given a platform for the inflammatory lies of UKIP’s Nigel Farage on an almost daily basis.

Why is that? Why would a supposedly unbiased news channel give disproportionate coverage to one very minor, single-issue party?

But the most important question remains: why would the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom not take one of the few opportunities available to him to be remembered as a statesman?

When the referendum is not legally binding, when both sides of the referendum campaigns have been revealed to have misled the public, when the majority is so small, when more than four million people have signed a petition calling for a second referendum, and when the result has directly led to a five-fold increase in race-hate crimes, why not halt the process, consult with the public, parliament and the EU, and provide for a second referendum? https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/13121

Whatever speculation you might like to entertain about what went down in Downing Street, I couldn’t possibly comment. But I will be very interested to find out with which corporations David Cameron gets non-executive directorships when he leaves parliament.

In October 2014, I worked as the event technician at an afternoon conference at a hotel in Sheffield. With hindsight, I wish I had paid more attention, but one of the speakers said something that really sticks in my mind; a man from Kier (one of the PFI construction and infrastructure contractors to Sheffield City Council) said, during his presentation, “It’s no secret that the US military want to move all their European operations to the UK, and we want a piece of that action.”

I’m paraphrasing because I didn’t make an audio recording and I didn’t write a transcript at the time, but it’s come back to haunt me in the light of our recently passed referendum on EU membership. I didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement, nor was I asked not to repeat anything I heard at that meeting and, apparently, it’s no secret.

He didn’t go into detail, and I cannot recall well enough to know if he meant actual military bases, or the stationing of aircraft, or simply administration. Or maybe he meant the so-called “black sites”. Outside of the EU, and without that tiresome Human Rights business, the UK would be a very convenient strategic location.

I have heard no mention of this since, on any media channel, and it might not be what it seems, but I can’t help being reminded of the so-called “special relationship” between the UK and US, so beloved of Reagan and Thatcher, as well as Churchill and Roosevelt. A special relationship between two countries sounds like a good thing, but what it eventually revealed itself to be was the use of RAF Greenham Common as a base for US nuclear bombers, and and our own nuclear power industry supplying the US with plutonium for the warheads.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Relationship

Make no mistake, when I refer to “Americans” in this context, I do not mean the people of US nationality, I mean the establishment of the USA. That is the CIA, the NSA, the military-industrial complex, the National Rifle Association (NRA), the privatised prisons, the medical insurance companies, big pharma, fast-food corporations and the blood-sucking financial speculators of Wall Street. The government-corporate complex in the UK is corrupt to the core, but almost a paragon of virtue compared with the United States.

Over the last 30 years, Britain has been actively diminished by the greedy obsessions of Margaret Thatcher’s denial of society and the promotion of consumption and selfishness, and my motives are a lot more complex than just wanting to grab a piece of that action without considering its consequences.

I voted Remain (warts and all) because every time I go to a European country I am delighted by the experience, although often ashamed of my own association of being English / British. Because we have a reputation, hard-won, of being drunken, thuggish and ignorant. I aspire to be more European, not less, but there is a much more frightening spectre at this particular bonfire of the cultural vanities: the United States.

Without the protection of the European bloc, I worry that the paid-for shills in the UK Conservative party have already made a pact with the devil, and I do not want the UK to be the jumping off point for the US’ military coups, “extraordinary renditions” or democracy-bringing in Europe or anywhere else.

I voted remain for two reasons: becasue I want to be more like Europe (warts and all) and because I do not want to live in the fifty-first state of the USA.